Hydrogen is of great interest as a fuel, as its oxidation produces benign water (without CO₂ emissions), its gaseous form can be transported in existing pipe infrastructure, and it can be obtained via renewable electricity from water. However, current hydrogen production is mainly produced from fossil fuels (e.g. methane), exacerbating...
Pesticides benefit agriculture by increasing crop yield, quality, and security. However, pesticides may inadvertently harm bees, which are valuable as pollinators. Thus, candidate pesticides in development pipelines must be assessed for toxicity to bees.
Leveraging a data set of 382 molecules with toxicity labels from honey bee exposure experiments, we...
The Micralyne microfluidic toolkit (μTK) was an instrument built by Micralyne in the early 2000’s. It was built for electrophoresis and has a sensitive laser-induced fluorescence detection system. The updates to the system were upgrading the control GUI from running in LabVIEW 5 (Windows XP, 2000) to LabVIEW 2012 (Windows...
The thesis documents research about combining the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) Permit Program with the Impact 2002+ methodology to conduct a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for wastewater treatment processes. The LCA for the operational phase of a local wastewater treatment plant was performed and the environmental impacts caused...
Metal Organic Framework (MOF) materials, consisting of metal ions with organic linkers, have a functional cavity structure which can be utilized in applications such as catalyst, micro sensing, and gas absorption. Due to MOF materials' selective gas adsorption property, interest in MOF materials has intensified in the last few years,...
The effect of cosputtered catalyst on growth and alignment of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) grown by plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) was investigated. Aligned CNTs were observed using a cosputtered catalytic metal deposited directly on boro-aluminosilicate glass. Catalytic metal alloys were sputtered directly onto the substrate using magnetron sputtering. Deposition...
A computationally efficient and accurate substrate noise coupling model for multiple contacts in heavily doped CMOS processes is presented and validated with simulations and experimental data. The model is based on Z parameters that are scalable with contact separation and size. This results in fast extraction of substrate resistances for...
As e-commerce and urban deliveries spike, there is an increasing demand for curbside loading/unloading space. However, commercial vehicle drivers face numerous challenges while navigating dense urban road networks. Previous literature on the topic of how commercial vehicle drivers make choices about when and where to park is scarce, and data...
Solar thermal energy can be stored and later converted to electrical energy using a combination of thermochemical energy storage (TCES) and a thermoelectric generator (TEG). This TEG and TCES combination illustrates a potential route for clean electricity storage from renewable energy. TCES allows for thermal energy from the sun to...